Barkly beef
Northern Territory. Department of Primary Industry and Fisheries
Barkly Beef; E-Journals; PublicationNT; Barkly Beef
2016-06-01
Made available via the Publications (Legal Deposit) Act 2004 (NT).; This publication contains many links to external sites. These external sites may no longer be active.
English
Agriculture; Tennant Creek Region; Periodicals
Northern Territory Government
Tennant Creek
Barkly Beef
Newsletter, June 2016
application/pdf
1325-9539
Attribution International 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)
Northern Territory Government
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
https://hdl.handle.net/10070/266011
https://hdl.handle.net/10070/455034
DEPARTMENT OF PRIMARY INDUSTRY AND FISHERIES Page 7 of 23 Barkly Beef Newsletter So what does all this mean for rotational grazing? Increased revenue can come in two ways when developing country that was previously poorly watered. 1. Increasing carrying capacity: adding waters to bring previously unwatered (areas further than three kilometres from water) country into production increases carrying capacity, because more of your land is available to cattle. 2. Improving land condition: areas around old waters are often degraded. Lightening stocking rates through water development may lead to improved land condition and growth of pastures over time, which would also increase carrying capacity, but at a much slower pay back rate. Recovery of pastures takes the right stocking rates, time and the right combination of seasons. Its a long term game that is unlikely to bring quick results. Stocking rates need to be adjusted downwards to help pasture recovery in formerly degraded areas. Wet season spelling and safely stocking during the Dry Season may speed up the rate of recovery. In the short term, initial returns on development investment will only come through initial increases in carrying capacity when developing previously poorly watered areas. Things to consider when planning development: what is the carrying capacity of the area currently within three kilometres of water? how much more land will be within three kilometres of water post-development? what will be the increase in carrying capacity with additional waters? centrally located waters provide more even grazing than corner waters, but can be more expensive to develop and access. Make sure the investment is not greater than your projected increase in carrying capacity to make it pay its way. Biodiversity monitoring at the peabush rotational grazing trial site on Beetaloo Station Steve Eldridge, Desert Wildlife Services, Alice Springs Rotational grazing spreads grazing pressure more evenly across pastoral land and provides opportunity for pasture to be spelled each year after a single burst of intensive grazing. This project aimed to determine whether changing to an intensive rotational grazing system would provide a net benefit to native plants and animals. Would the positive impacts of reducing grazing pressure in previously high impact areas outweigh the potentially negative impacts of losing lightly grazed refuge areas in paddocks? Biodiversity was monitored twice a year for three years at 20 sites, selected deliberately to represent four Typical pitfall trap. Each monitoring site contained four of these set-ups